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It’s Not Easy Picking a Path to Enlightenment

NEW AGE A walking meditation exercise at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Massachusetts.Credit
Rick Friedman for The New York Times

Stockbridge, Mass.

ON the last Tuesday in June, the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health was a New Age encyclopedia come to life.

A roomful of seekers pursued “Total Immersion for Total Transformation.” A lecturer demonstrated yoga poses to combat anxiety and depression. Pounding music issued from a gymlike hall where the inventor of a “movement experience” called JourneyDance supervised the liberation of her trainees’ second chakras. “The burning in our souls and the fever in our hearts and the fervor in our eyes as we’re hoping and we’re praying ...” went the soundtrack as women waved their arms heavenward or sat crosslegged on the floor.

So many paths to serenity; so many pilgrims: 30,000 guests a year come to Kripalu, which bills itself as the biggest retreat center in the country, offering 700 workshops and seminars annually.

But behind the scenes in a crowded second-floor suite at Kripalu’s sprawling lakefront campus here in the Berkshires, things are a tad less restful. Beneath a long expanse of whiteboard and corkboard plastered with thousands of color-coded sheets and dots laying out each day’s offerings from 2007 through the end of next year, phones ring ceaselessly. Gaps between projected and actual attendance are tracked like stock prices, and self-proclaimed visionaries and healers are subjected to the scrutiny of veteran vetters.

This is Kripalu’s programming office, known internally as Mission Control or Grand Central, where the gatekeepers decide who merits the instant respectability a player like Kripalu confers in the ever-expanding Lohas industry (that’s lifestyles of health and sustainability). For a place that makes its living selling relaxation and harmony, the love can feel a little tough.

“I’m getting a lot of inquiries about spiritual programs for children,” one programmer skeptically told a woman who came in to pitch a seminar on stress and the family. Another programmer read aloud from a proposal: “Self-realization and Enlightenment in the Kripalu Tradition.”

“Sounds ambitious,” a colleague said dryly.

Kripalu’s programming director, Denise Barack, gestured at the room-long scheduling board. “We could do a commercial for Post-its,” she said.

Anyone who sets foot in a health-food store has seen the bulging catalogs for holistic meccas like Kripalu or Esalen or the Omega Institute. The course listings can seem almost like a collection of randomly combined buzzwords: “path,” “wellness,” “Rumi,” “goddess,” “awakening.” But deciding what goes into those catalogs is a process that leaves little to chance or flow. With one hand firmly on the bottom line and the other grasping for the spiritual firmament, the people who run Kripalu are engaged in a sort of permanent yoga stretch.

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Janna Delgado, a yoga teacher, conducts a class.Credit
Rick Friedman for The New York Times

“We’re constantly re-examining,” said Kripalu’s president, Ila Sarley. “What are the needs? What are the needs of the market, and what are the needs of society?” In the end, everything comes down to what will bring bodies in the door. “What we’re looking at,” Ms. Sarley said, “is what will someone pay to take a vacation to do.”

People will usually pay, of course, to vacation at the feet of a bona fide New Age celebrity. Outside the JourneyDance room, Ms. Barack, an energetic 48-year-old with big eyes and a beaming smile, pointed out a craggy-faced man named David Williams on a promotional poster for a coming Ashtanga yoga festival. “He’s the top of the Amway line in terms of Ashtanga," she said excitedly.

To get the big names, Kripalu, a nonprofit institution that cannot match the offers from private spas and corporate clients, bends over backward to make instructors feel at home.

“You figure out what they want,” Ms. Sarley said. “They want candy, and we don’t do candy, but we’ll get them candy. Or they want a certain kind of meat.”

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Business deals and the details of seminars are hammered out on the lake behind Kripalu. One presenter told Ms. Barack, “Kayaking is your golf.” The lake also affords privacy from the clutch of devotees, which can be hard to come by. “People have — not groupies, but people really want to be in their presence,” Ms. Barack said.

To figure out who, or what, the next big thing will be, Kripalu programmers go on scouting trips, to professional conferences, to other retreat centers. They keep an ear out for cross-promotional opportunities.

“Shiva Rea” — a marquee yoga teacher — “will say, ‘That Simon Park, he’s really up and coming,’ and sure enough he is,” Ms. Barack said. “We want to catch them on the edge. By the time they hit our catalog, he’s going to be on the cover of Yoga Journal.”

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MEANWHILE AT MISSION CONTROL Staff members check the extensive programming board at Kripalu.Credit
Rick Friedman for The New York Times

If you’re not a celebrity, it helps to be related to one. Ms. Barack noted that the man leading the “Working With Your Angels” seminar was “the son of someone who’s well known for angel work. She’ll draw 300 people.”

Even so, Ms. Sarley said, “about 20 percent of the things we try fail.” A program on “Conscious Kitchens” featuring the cookbook author and food activist Francis Moore Lappé was poorly attended. “Some of our more socially conscious programs tend not to draw as well,” Ms. Sarley said. “Probably we should have focused more on foodies and gourmet.” Other dud categories include aging (“People want to feel like they’ll be eternally youthful,” Ms. Sarley said), gardening and feng shui.

And even stars, if they want to be invited back, need to be mindful of the line between offering tools for enlightenment and engaging in crass self-promotion. “I’ve had to sit down with people who’d just drawn 250 or 300 people,” Ms. Barack said, “and tell them, ‘This is not the opportunity to be trying to push the book.’ ”

Then there are the hundreds upon hundreds of would-be workshop leaders who come knocking on Kripalu’s door. At least 90 percent are rejected, Ms. Barack said. The reasons can range from insufficiently appealing subject matter to a thin résumé to a bad vibe about the proposer, something that the folks at Kripalu were particularly sensitized to by their founding guru’s fall from grace in a sex scandal in the mid-’90s.

Programmers at other holistic centers said they used similar criteria. “One of the first qualities needed for a programmer is a high-level detector for baloney,” said Ralph White, a founder of the New York Open Center. “Crystals, channeling, dubious gurus. Plowing through that relentless stream of proposals, there were certain phrases that would always trigger ‘I don’t think so.’ ”

Still, at Kripalu and elsewhere, there is always room for something new. At the end of August, Kripalu will offer, for the first time, a three-day seminar in rock balancing, the contemplative practice of stacking stones into precarious-looking formations. The presenter, Lila Higgins, an environmental artist based in California, said she was emboldened by an image from the Kripalu catalog itself.

“I saw a Kripalu magazine,” she said, “and on the cover I saw a stack of rocks. And I thought, ‘Hey, I need to propose a class for this.’ ”

The scheduling board in the Kripalu programming office lists a projected attendance of 20 for Ms. Higgins’s class. As of Wednesday, six people had signed up — not bad, given that there were seven weeks left to register, Ms. Barack said. She said she was hopeful the class would fill up.

“Sometimes we just have to take risks,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page G1 of the New York edition with the headline: It’s Not Easy Picking a Path to Enlightenment. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe